On Thursday September 15th, Laurence Kruger gave a Natural Resource Management (NRM) talk titled “Elephant Impacts on the Demography of Rare Tree Species in Kruger Park.” Dr. Kruger is a Professor within the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS)- South Africa, a nonprofit consortium of over 50 universities and research institutions around the globe. The talk introduced the experiential education provided by the OTS program and presented research on the increased vulnerabilities of trees exposed to bark stripping by elephants and holes drilled by bore hole beetles.
Globally, there is a serious decline in large old trees and this decline is of particular concern in the savannah areas of sub-Saharan Africa. Of course, there have also been sharp declines in elephant populations in Africa, largely due to poaching. But the ways in which the remaining elephant populations have been managed, including their enclosure within fenced-in national parks, directly effects rare tree populations. Elephants have varied eating patterns, grazing and seeds during the summer months, and transitioning to leaves then branches and then the stripping of bark during the dry season. As elephants are limited to specific land areas within national parks, their impact on trees is more concentrated than would otherwise naturally occur. When trees are stripped of their bark they become vulnerable to pathogens and fires. Finally, as trees die there are significant trickle down effects for plant communities and resident faunal communities.